As May and June headed towards July, I began to feel that life was calming down and brightening up a bit – albeit with the odd cloud darkening our days every now and then. At the end of May, after I’d spent the best part of five months asking E to tell his parents what had […]
Tag: singleparent
A foreign country
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” – L P Hartley, The Go Between Yesterday I finally did something that I haven’t been able to face doing since E left. I started re-reading the letters and emails that I had found (and I had written myself) when I discovered E’s first […]
Facebook Fail
After Spanx Night, I steered clear of the booze for a few weeks. I also avoided going out, in fact, I don’t think I left the house in the evening until we went on holiday in July. To be honest, I was (still am) finding being in company quite difficult, so I retreated behind my […]
Broken?
Kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. It treats breakage and repair as part of an object, rather than something to disguise, hide or dispose of. I was recently watching a presentation about the dangers of radicalisation by extremists in schools, colleges and universities. The presenter […]
Stories
When we moved to Singapore the first proper storm we experienced – at 3am – resulted in a Sound of Music-esque scene, where, with each fresh crash of thunder, a different child ran barefoot into my room and threw themselves under my duvet. For those first few months my bed became a place of sanctuary […]
Grenades
I’m breaking with this blog’s usual ‘timeline’ to interject with something that happened today. I wanted to mark it, diarise it, write about it whilst it was fresh. So far, this blog has been retrospective, and I’ve had months to calm down and try to put things in perspective before writing, but today provided an […]
Aftershocks
If E leaving and all the stuff surrounding it, was the initial earthquake, then I suppose I should have expected some aftershocks. One of the things that constantly surprises about this whole thing has been how long it is taking me to ‘get over it’, and how hurt I have been by it. I know […]
First Day
In what would be a year of Firsts after E left, I think my first day at work in 19 years was one of the most daunting. I had literally been at home since September 1998. I was used to my own company, my own rules. I was used to silence and my own space. […]
Dark Hours Symphony
It’s a very long time since I did O’ Level music (the fact that it was an O’ Level, not a GCSE, is indicative of exactly how long), but it occurred to me the other night (when I was wide awake, obvs) that my Dark Hours Anxiety has a particular pattern and follows an almost […]
Things I miss
I was just thinking that this blog has been a tad a bit Anti-E so far. Whilst I’m sure most of you (especially my Mum) are now saying ‘Well….Duh!”, I did think it was slightly unfair to be totally negative about him and thought that maybe I should redress the balance? There were *some* good […]